a free and open source electronic lab notebook

Designed by researchers, for researchers, with usability in mind.

With eLabFTW you get a secure, modern and compliant system to track your experiments efficiently but also manage your lab with a powerful and flexible database.

If you do experimental research, then eLabFTW is for you. Whatever your field is. It is also well suited for universities, tinkerers or biotech companies.

eLabFTW is powered by PHP/MySQL in Docker containers. It should be installed on a server. One install can be for a team, or the whole institution. You can also install it on your computer just for yourself.

features

Features

Free

Open-source with an AGPL licence means free as in beer but also free as in freedom. You have the freedom to modify it, look how it works and even redistribute your changes!

Secure

Strong encryption, good practices and modern codebase offers the best security for your data.

Responsive

You can access your lab book from any device, running any operating system, from anywhere in the world!

screenshots

Some screenshots

I love software websites without screenshots of the actual thing. − No one ever.

Live demo

Screenshots are cool, but if you want to really feel what the app can and cannot do, head to the live demo:

documentation

Documentation / Installation instructions

Wait, wait! Maybe you don’t need to install it! If you are doing research in an University or Institute you might want to ask the IT service to install it on the local network. This way, all the other teams can use the same install!

eLabFTW should be installed on a server. It uses the Docker container technology, so you don’t directly download it, you use a configuration file that instructs Docker to fetch the eLabFTW image.

If you’re not familiar with Docker and server administration, it is recommended to opt for a managed hosted solution. See our pricing on this page: eLabFTW hosted pricing.